Growing up poor in isolated rural areas and small towns is qualitatively different from growing up poor in the city. Yet most of what experts know about the effects of poverty on children's development comes from studies conducted in big cities. Now, an ambitious project run by universities in Pennsylvania and North Carolina is putting what some scholars feel is a long-overdue research focus on disadvantaged children in less-populated stretches of the country. Known as the Family Life Project, the study began in 2002 and set out a year later to track the lives of 1,292 children born between September 2003 and the following September. The project, which won a $12.8 million grant last month from the National Institutes of Health to continue the next five-year phase of its work, is the largest, most comprehensive and representative study to date of children's development in rural America, according to Lynne Vernon-Feagans, one of the principal investigators. If the project continues to get financial support, researchers hope to track the children in the study, most of whom are now preschoolers, into adulthood. Meanwhile, they will gather information on how the children interact with their families, what their homes, schools, and preschools are like, and the kinds of educational resources available to the children as they grow up. The scholars will also gauge children's cognitive development, literacy skills, temperament, and academic performance--and even take physiological measures of their stress levels.